Infidel753

30 January 2017

Video of the day -- pressure works

Rachel Maddow documents how Trump and his gang have repeatedly backed down in the face of pressure from Congress or the public. Let these examples embolden us to make that pressure irresistible when the big fights -- over Obamacare, Social Security, voting rights, and other key bastions of progress -- are waged. Video found via Politics Plus.

That's far from surprising. Set aside the cabinet of cranks and kleptocrats. Set aside the ominous requests for names of government scientists working on climate change. Set aside the gag order on EPA scientists (it's working already -- I'm gagging, and I'm not even a scientist). Set aside the plans for Soviet-style military parades in our cities. These are characteristic acts of a despot, and while despots are evil, they are not necessarily mentally unstable.

Consider instead the insistence on lying about things that are easily checked for veracity. We've all heard about Trump's unhinged reaction to media reports on the mediocre turnout for his inauguration, and the blatant untruths he required Spicer and Conway to spout on his behalf. He's now making equally fatuous assertions about the response to his speech at the CIA Memorial Wall, despite almost universal condemnation of its disrespectful and vulgar use of the venue, and despite the widely-broadcasted revelation that the applause heard there came from flunkies brought along for the purpose. And he's now demanding an investigation into his own delusional claims that "illegal voting" accounted for Hillary's huge victory margin in the popular vote, claims supported by absolutely nothing except bald assertion.

Burr Deming suggests that Trump may be driven by a need to assert masculinity -- as Marco Rubio might put it, if a man has a small inaugural-crowd size, something else may be small as well. But millions of men suffer from feelings of inadequacy and an urge to assert manliness. It doesn't usually drive them to make up easily-refuted lies (sorry, "alternative facts") out of thin air and then try to bully the rest of the world into accepting them as true despite the plain reality they can see with their own eyes. Most men, after all, have an even stronger desire to avoid appearing ridiculous. Something is very wrong here, probably above and beyond the long-standing diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder.

My question to those "Republican officials" who are now suddenly so alarmed, though, is this -- have you been living in a cave for the last year and a half? Trump didn't suddenly start behaving like this six days ago. Throughout the whole primary and general-election campaign, he displayed the mental stability of a foul-mouthed, bad-tempered toddler. Why didn't you stop him? The Republican establishment's anti-Trump efforts are already going down in history as the epitome of fecklessness and cowardice. "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world," with H-bombs on standby yet, and now all of a sudden you've noticed that this guy is too unstable and impulsive to occupy the position you helped him get "elected" to?

Even if enough Congressional Republicans see the light to join with Democrats in impeaching this preposterous and appalling miscarriage of democracy, your party will forever be tarred with the fact that you inflicted such a fiasco on the world in the first place. And we will never, ever let you forget it.

Ah, well, at least the growing alarm and doubts among the enemy offer us some comfort. It's at least some of the worst who lack all conviction. And based on what we saw on Saturday, when our female-led pink-hatted legions thronged city streets across the nation and around the planet, it's the best who are full of passionate intensity.

24 January 2017

Random observations for January 2017

It's a good thing I've never been one for pets. I'm not the nurturing type; I probably couldn't even keep a cockroach alive.

o o o o o

You learn more by listening than by talking. If those around you are chatterboxes and you are reserved, you will know much about them, while they know little about you -- which works to your advantage.

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An intelligent person will judge your beliefs by your reasons for holding them. The vehemence with which you express them counts for nothing.

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I have never seen the point of marriage. It basically means inviting the government and/or a church into your relationship as a third partner, and vastly complicates things if the relationship reaches a natural end.

o o o o o

If you aren't sure which side is right in some social or political controversy, look for which side most of the guys in suits and ties are supporting. That's the side which is wrong. This rule works in probably 95% of cases.

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Military conscription is a device whereby old, decrepit males slake their resentment and envy of young, vigorous males by enslaving them and exposing them to dismemberment, disfigurement, and death.

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The enemy is not the person who says "I want to do that". The enemy is the person who says "You can't do that".

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If you're just going to be like everybody else, what's the point of existing at all?

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A response consisting of "You are a [word ending in -ist]" or "This is a form of [word ending in -ism]" is not an argument and does not refute anything. It's just fancy name-calling, a dodge to avoid dealing with the substance of whatever you're supposedly responding to.

20 January 2017

The RMRR takes over

Today's Trump inauguration marks the final step in creating the Republican Minority-Rule Regime. I call it this to emphasize that, aside from Trump "winning" with almost three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, the 52 Republican Senators combined won eleven million fewer votes that the 46 Democratic ones did. In contrast with the massive Democratic victory of 2008 (achieved, also, without benefit of foreign meddling or vote-suppression laws), Trump and his party cannot claim any kind of mandate. If it were true that "America voted for" bigotry, xenophobia, vulgarity, incompetence, and kleptocracy, then a government based on those things could claim that it at least represented what the country actually wanted. But America did nothing of the kind.

Always remember, there's more of us than there is of them. We, not the Trumpanzees, are the real America.

Of course, humility is not in most Republicans' lexicon (and certainly not in Trump's), and the lack of legitimacy has no practical effect except insofar as it helps motivate resistance on our own side. The RMRR has just as much legal power as a popularly-elected government would have, and will use it. The practical issue is what we can actually do now.

The debacle over the Office of Congressional Ethics points the way. When Congressional Republicans tried to gut it, a wave of calls from an infuriated public quickly made them back down. And this protest happened on very short notice, with no time to really organize anything, over an issue that has no practical impact on most people's lives. Imagine what we'll be able to do to defend Obamacare, Social Security, Medicare, and other programs whose loss would devastate millions.

I'm convinced that most Republican politicians are fundamentally cowards. That's a big part of why Trump made it to where he is today. He bullied and insulted his way to the nomination, backed by a wave of outright threats from his troglodytic followers. Many Republicans clearly hated what they were seeing, and spoke out against it; but their efforts to stop him were timid and feckless, and they fell into line quickly as he kept winning. On the OCE, they could probably have gone ahead, ignoring the protests, with little consequence -- it's not as if that issue would have loomed large in many voters' minds in November 2018. But they didn't. Trump himself isn't that kind of critter, but the enemy in Congress has shown they will yield to pressure. We must supply that pressure, as is already happening on Obamacare repeal. Remember, the Democratic minorities in both houses are substantial. Only three Republican Senators, or a few dozen Republican Congressmen, need be swayed to stop any given action.

And Trump will lose a lot of those besotted followers. It's already happening. He won't bring industrial jobs back. He won't prosecute Hillary. He won't get Mexico to pay for the wall (and probably won't even build it). He won't "drain the swamp". A lot of Trumpanzees benefit from Obamacare and Social Security.

Never listen to those who tell us everything is already lost (and yes, I admit that for a brief time I was among them). Don't read that link, read this one, my response to a bout of despair on our side in early 2010 when the original passage of Obamacare seemed doomed. As I pointed out at the time, progressives of generations past -- Dr. King, Frederick Douglass, César Chávez, Harvey Milk, the suffragettes and union organizers of a century ago -- faced daunting circumstances, but they kept fighting and ultimately won. If we keep fighting, we still might lose. If we don't, we will definitely lose.

To help you get in the right mood, here's Keith Olbermann (found via Crazy Eddie a few weeks ago):

17 January 2017

Carol (2015) -- romance in a dark time

Love stories as such aren't usually my kind of movie, but when I read about this one I knew I had to see it. It didn't disappoint.

Therese (Rooney Mara), a young woman in New York city in 1952, has a boyfriend and a sales job in a department store, neither of which much thrill her. One day shortly before Christmas a rich woman customer in her 40s, Carol (Cate Blanchett) forgets her gloves in the store and Therese returns them. Carol invites her for lunch as a thank-you, and they hit it off well. Carol spends more and more time with Therese, gives her gifts, encourages her aspirations as a photographer. Without homosexuality ever being mentioned, the nature of Carol's attraction, and Therese's growing reciprocation of it, gradually become apparent.

Carol is involved in a divorce battle which is turning ugly over the issue of custody of her daughter. Her husband, Harge, knows about her lesbian inclinations (she had had at least one previous affair with a woman). When he finally obtains hard evidence of her relationship with Therese, he has no hesitation about using the bigotry of the time against her in the custody fight. Though the relationship has grown serious, Carol breaks it off, knowing that it could endanger her future access to her daughter.

I can't overstate how well the film tells its story. Romantic feelings must be among the most difficult for actors to express convincingly, yet the slow development of the relationship always feels natural, organic, normal, despite our knowing how unusual and potentially dangerous such a courtship would have been in the 1950s (besides the lesbianism, there is a substantial age difference -- in the novel the film was based on, Therese is 19). The beauty of it contrasts perfectly with the ugly, shabby, sordid traditional morality standing against it.

The film avoids clichés, however. Everything that happens is the kind of thing that could and did happen in the era in which it's set. Even Harge is not a cartoonish villain; though he resorts to disgusting tactics, he's trying to do what he thinks is best for his daughter according to the warped and limited standards instilled in him by the culture he grew up in. Once Carol goes for broke and appeals to him not to make things ugly because their daughter would suffer, he sees the light -- enough to give her an acceptable settlement, anyway.

Another cliché the film avoids is the obligatory tragic ending which plagues so many gay relationship movies. An "ordinary" movie would have ended with the break-up, leaving both women bereft and miserable. Here, after the divorce is settled, Carol gets up the courage to ask Therese to take her back, and in the last moments it's clear that she does.

Realistically, of course, in the 1950s their relationship would have faced continuous threats from the surrounding society, having to be concealed or risk harsh hostility and perhaps even attack by the laws of the time. Some activists even today treat social issues as peripheral, deeming only economic change to be important, but they couldn't be more wrong. When religious taboo "morality" reigned unopposed, it caused immense misery and deprivation. Carol was popular with gay viewers for breaking with cliché and having a happy ending, but it shows how much times have changed that, by 2015, the filmmakers knew the story deserved a happy ending.

Video of the day -- animals in the snow

11 January 2017

Art foreshadows life -- scapegoating the truth-tellers

A couple of weeks ago I was watching some clips from the 1983 TV miniseries "V" on YouTube, and I suddenly realized that part of it was powerfully reminding me of recent events. If you're not familiar with "V", in a nutshell, one day a fleet of huge alien spaceships appears and deploys over cities all over the Earth. The apparently human-looking aliens explain that their mission is benign, and a period of friendly contact begins, despite ominous signs like the aliens' fascistic-looking red uniforms and omnipresent display of a vaguely swastika-like symbol. Behind the scenes, however, they are subverting and taking over the world's governments and media. Suddenly, it is announced that a global conspiracy of scientists against the aliens has been discovered. To thwart this menace, the world's now alien-dominated governments declare martial law and "ask" the aliens to help enforce it. Scientists everywhere are demonized and persecuted. Most people, uneasy with events but swayed by the pro-alien propaganda filling the media, go along with the new reality. The aliens have reduced Earth to a de facto colonial possession and now set about stealing its resources.

When I originally saw the show, the fake scientist conspiracy seemed like one of the least credible elements in it. Surely no one would believe claims of such a conspiracy and turn against the scientific community, and even aliens would realize that?

But look what's happening now.

The right wing in the US (and to a more limited extent in some other English-speaking countries) has been settling into an anti-science stance for some time. It started with their alliance with fundamentalist Christianity, which rejects evolution. Their hardening commitment to global-warming denialism created a similar conflict with another scientific consensus. More generally, their embrace of non-fact-based dogmas in fields from economics to human sexuality requires a general hostility to the entire concept of testing claims against real-world evidence.

Given the rejection of evolution and global warming, the fact that almost all scientists in the relevant fields accept those things practically demands that the denialist assume they're all in some sort of conspiracy to hide the truth, and I've actually seen some wingnuts claim that climate scientists worldwide are in fact conspiring to perpetrate a vast hoax, supposedly motivated by getting research grants (this doesn't make sense, but anyone smart enough to notice that probably wouldn't be a denialist in the first place). Growing evidence that homosexuality is a natural phenomenon is dismissed as part of the liberal/Satanic conspiracy of scientists and pop entertainment to "normalize sin". And so it goes.

It makes sense that the aliens in "V" would seek to discredit and ultimately destroy the Earth's scientific community. They aren't really as human as they look, and Earth's human population is a potential food supply for them -- and scientists would be the most likely people to discover these facts and be able to prove them. But there's a more general principle here. If you're pushing a set of ideas which is at odds with objective reality, then people trained in deducing facts from evidence and proving them -- scientists -- are your natural enemies. They're the people most capable of reasserting that objective reality and backing up what they say about it -- of authoritatively declaring not just "I disagree" but "you are wrong".

This natural tension has recently crossed the line into open attack in ways we haven't seen before. The most alarming was the Trump team's request to the Energy Department for names of scientists who had worked on Obama's anti-global-warming initiatives. To their credit, department officials refused, and Trump's people eventually backed off from the request -- but the message was one of intimidation and denunciation. Climate scientists, it made clear, are out of favor with the new powers that be, and the future may bring further moves against them and their defenders. To their credit, government scientists recognized from the start that the incoming administration was likely to be hostile, and have been copying climate data to computer systems outside the government's control to make sure it is preserved.

There are other signs that Trump's regime will be hostile to science. He's chosen a global-warming denialist to head the EPA and a denialist propagandist to manage the transition. His VP choice, Mike Pence, is a fervent Christianist best known for his anti-gay stance, but also aggressively ignorant about science. Most recently Trump chose a prominent anti-vaccine nutjob to chair a commission on vaccine safety. All this will play well with the troglodyte Republican voting base, with its suspicion of education and expertise generally, but it also legitimizes such attitudes in the eyes of a broader public which lacks such prejudices but is honestly uninformed about the issues.

All this will not be good for the country. Political interference in science never is. The Nazi regime banned the works of Darwin and rejected much of the innovative physics of the day as "Jewish"; many scientists fled Europe for the United States, and some of them helped us, rather than the Nazis, build the first atomic bomb. Stalin's support for the charlatan Lysenko, and persecution of real geneticists who opposed him, caused the USSR to fall far behind the West in the field of genetics. Religious domination of Europe during the Dark Ages, and its rejection of the Classical scientific and philosophical tradition, brought a thousand years of stagnation. The Middle East followed the same path after the rise of Ash'arite theology around 1100, with similar results. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of American scientists, with an eye on the incoming administration, are already looking into opportunities in other countries -- and if things get as bad as Trump's moves so far suggest they will, that trend will escalate.

Incidentally, the original script of "V" -- fake scientist conspiracy and all -- depicted an indigenous fascist take-over of the US, and was only later re-written as science fiction with aliens as the villains. While this made it more entertaining and probably more plausible to the audiences of the time, the message comes across the same. I've always emphasized pop entertainment's power to encourage positive social change, but sometimes its role is to serve us a warning.

05 January 2017

Responding to the Republican regime

Some Democrats (mostly bloggers and other commentators, not politicians) have proposed that we should respond to the coming Republican-dominated regime by blocking everything it tries to do, no matter what the merits of the case. This is the wrong approach.

The vast majority of what the new minority-rule regime tries to do will be bad, and must be resisted. That's beyond dispute. But it's possible that from time to time some element of that regime may propose something positive. The most likely "element" to do this is Trump himself, whose positions are notoriously changeable and non-ideological.

As an example, at various times during the campaign Trump suggested he'd support raising the federal minimum wage, though of course at other times he's said the opposite. If at some point during his term he actually proposed doing this, it would be absurd for Democrats to oppose it simply because he was the one making the suggestion. The same would apply if he eventually reacted to a prolonged debacle about "replacing Obamacare" by proposing a single-payer system, something he's also talked about in the past -- or if he made an unexpectedly moderate nomination for the Supreme Court. In the unlikely event that he actually did any of these things, he wouldn't get much Republican support, but there are past examples of Presidents working with the opposition party to pass things their own party objected to.

The average person struggling to survive on the minimum wage or worrying about health insurance doesn't give a rodent's posterior about whether some politician (or blogger) succeeds in remaining unsullied and pure from the taint of cooperation with a Republican. He just wants a better minimum wage or more secure insurance. If you're a member of Congress, your job is to serve the interests of that person, not to show off how strong of an absolutist posture you can adopt. Pragmatism dictates that when an opportunity arises to do some good for the country, that good must indeed be done. Real leaders get this, with Pelosi, Sanders, and Schumer having already said they would work with Trump if he ever does offer any progressive proposals.

The pragmatism of political gain points in the same direction. It will be argued that if Trump were to propose (say) a higher minimum wage, Democrats should not help pass it because Trump would get the credit. However, Democrats would get some of the credit, especially if most Republicans noisily resisted the idea. And if Democrats responded to such a scenario by blocking the increase, Trump would still get the credit for trying, while Democrats would get the blame, and millions of low-wage workers would not get the increase they need.

It's important that this be grasped not only by Congressional Democrats, but by activists and ordinary people as well. Mass public opposition can actually force Congress to change direction, as the recent attack and sudden reversal on the Office of Congressional Ethics showed. This is an encouraging sign for the next four years of dealing with the overwhelming majority of the Republican agenda which is unequivocally destructive and must be resisted. But we need to be prepared to respond properly to any opportunities which arise as well.

Here is how Asad presents himself in his own country. Saydnaya, by the way, is a largely Christian town, whose inhabitants have every reason to fear the worst from Dâ'ish (ISIL) or even the other Sunni rebel groups. Asad is probably genuinely popular there.

India's Skeleton Lake holds evidence of a mysterious mass killing over a thousand years ago.

About Me

Individualist, transhumanist, American patriot, socialist, atheist, liberal, optimist, pragmatist, and regular guy -- it has been my great good fortune to live my whole life free of "spirituality" of any kind. I believe that evidence and reason are the keys to understanding reality; that it is technology rather than ideology or politics that has been the great liberator of humanity; and that in the long run human intelligence is the most powerful force in the universe.